March 2, 2007

So you made it to #ubuntu on IRC, what next ?

If you have made it to #ubuntu and are a bit overwhelmed, here are some tips.

Find your preferred language for Ubuntu support, if you are not good in English. Usually a question like “is there a (your-language)channel for support ?” will get you a quick answer. To get into that channel key in /j #ubuntu-your-language, or look here to find your channel

Find a unique nick and change to that nick with the command /nick your-username.

Register you new nick with the command /Nickserv REGISTER password email . Use a valid email address, it might come in handy if you lose your password. Without registering certain features like private messaging wont work.

If you have a question, just ask your question; dont ask to ask.

After asking your question, be patient and don’t get upset if you get no answer; there is not always someone around who knows the answer. You can ask your question again after a few minutes if you do not hear anything.

Read the topic of the channel; it might have some valuable information for you, if you missed reading the topic or cannot see the topic message, the command /topic makes the topic visible.

Do not paste long textfiles into the channel, you might get banned or kicked for flooding. If you need to use long text files paste them into http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org and paste the link of the text file into the channel.